Unified Communications: Click to talk

It can be very frustrating for IT managers and C-level executives to continuously see unified communications in the headlines, and apparently driving business communications and strategy, yet nobody seems to know what it even means. How do you adopt and implement such a thing?

“There are so many definitions and interpretations. Some people say UC when they mean unified messaging. Some equate UC with just email, just instant messaging,” says Scott Gode, vice president of product management and marketing at managed UC communications provider Azaleos (www.azaleos.com).

A sidebar to the article defines three key points to help simplify and define unified communications:

Unified communications is designed to help your employees communicate more effectively with customers and one another.

UC encompasses many different areas, including telephony, messaging, and videoconferencing, each of which may be deployed and integrated with your network as appropriate.

As you construct your UC system, you must make sure the network plumbing supporting it is secure and reliable.

Cut Costs for Equipment by Using IP Phones Instead of PCs

XML service technology allows delivering interactive content right to an IP phone display and thus using it instead of a PC. With this capability you can streamline many business processes without equipping workplaces with PCs. For example, you can:

alert your employees when a panic button is pushed or a fire alarm is detected

set a preferable way of communication

sign-in for/sign-out from work (due to integration with ERP software)

Your benefits: IP phone services can help you:

save your employee time on daily tasks

save money on workplace equipment

Another tool to get maximum benefits from your enterprise VoIP network is call accounting software.

Decrease Your Employee Telecom Costs

Modern call accounting software is not only a tool to control employee telecom costs. As call-accounting software provides you with various reports on user phone conversations that are built on the base of call detail records (CDRs) received from your IP PBX, you can use it to derive information about

IP telephony software can also help you increase your administration staff productivity

Reduce Your VoIP Network Maintenance Expenses

The most of standard IP PBX administration interfaces are rather complicated, so you need highly skilled staff members to fulfill simple daily tasks. With special IP telephony management software you can simplify administration activities and entrust daily tasks to one, not necessarily experienced, employee.

There are a number of advantages to embracing new technologies early. By the time competitors catch on and jump on the bandwagon, your organization already has the pieces in place and maturing business practices built around the new tools.

Early adoption has some roadbumps as well, though. For example, the unified communications and VoIP arenas are in a relatively constant state of flux still. New companies emerge. Old companies die off. And mergers and acquisitions make for a constantly changing landscape of tools and technologies.

That may be confusing if your organization is trying to get in the game. It can be absolutely horrifying if your organization is already in the game and its your vendor that is shutting its doors and being acquired.

A very negative result of an acquisition may be the sale of some of the acquired company’s assets to pay, in part, for the acquisition. If these assets/products are those an enterprise depends on, then the customer will go through a second acquisition cycle, leading to more turmoil. In some cases, the acquiring company buys the technology, intellectual property and key employees and terminates the products.

Check out the rest of the article for tips and caveats you should be aware of if you end up in this situation.

Everything about technology projects seems to revolve around ROI–return on investment. The C-level executives want to know how long it will take to recoup the initial investment before giving a project the stamp of approval.

Networking and telecom pros know they must prove unified communications (UC) return on investment (ROI) to their CIO, CEO or CXO before purchasing and implementing unified communications solutions and that ROI needs to be actualized in less than 18 months, right? Probably, but I’d like to promote the idea that in the near future, providing a business case for short-term UC ROI may not be as necessary.

Pleasant goes on to say:

In most cases, we don’t question whether or not we need email and voicemail — they’re basic communication tools that virtually every organization needs so that workers can be efficient and effective. The same should be said for UC.

The point that Pleasant is essentially making is that organizations right now are looking at UC as a novelty and struggling to define its role in the organization, and hence its value from an ROI perspective.

However, UC is more than that. It is a productivity enhancer, a timeframe compressor, and an efficiency streamliner. UC comes with a lot of intangibles that are difficult to quantify directly in an ROI. But, that doesn’t change the fact that organizations that don’t start developing a UC strategy and investing in UC infrastructure will soon find themselves on the outside of next-generation business processes looking in.

You’ve heard the phrase “fight fire with fire”. Faced with an industry quickly converging to deliver video conferencing solutions–Cisco/Tandberg, Logitech/Lifesize, etc.–Polycom chose to blaze a new trail rather than fight that same fire.

Incumbent Polycom quickly mobilized with a counteroffensive play, hyper-focusing on a strategy to retain their current market share and pull customers away from the monolithic Cisco. Forging new partnerships, cultivating deep alliances with existing partners and an aggressive focus on product development is Polycom’s core strategy.

Read the blog post for more details about Polycom’s unique strategy to take a different fork in the road in an attempt to set itself apart rather than competing head-to-head.

Two of the hottest technologies over the past few years have been virtualization, and VoIP (three technologies if you throw in unified communications). Companies have been racing to jump on the bandwagon of virtualizing servers to save reduce hardware, power, and cooling expenses, and embracing VoIP to expand the potential of voice communications while cutting costs.

Unfortunately, due to the demands of VoIP and the need for maximum bandwidth and processing power to ensure voice quality, VoIP and virtualization haven’t played nicely together. Organizations could virtualize servers–just not the VoIP server.

Why should you need a consultant to deploy unified communications. The core of UC is voice communications and email which you already have–check! You just need to install a softphone / instant messaging client and configure the voicemail to be delivered to the email, and voila! A little duct tape and chewing gum, and you already have UC. Consultants. Ha!

In a recent survey of the purchasing intentions among SearchUnifiedCommunciations.com readers, 44% of respondents said their organizations lacked the expertise to implement UC projects in-house, and 68% of respondents acknowledged that they needed to learn more about unified communications.

Take a look at the article to learn more about the pros and cons of UC consultants, and why hiring an expert with a bigger strategic vision might save a lot of time, frustration, and money in the long run.

Unified communications and collaboration is obviously meant for business. No consumer technology would adopt such a complex collection of syllables as its name. Regardless of where the concept for UC, or for UCC began, though, there is evidence that its the consumer market, rather than the enterprise market, that is driving innovation, and perhaps even leading the way for more mainstream acceptance and adoption of many UC technologies.

Tools like Skype, Google Voice, or Google Buzz are targeted primarily at consumers, yet provide some level of UC capabilities and become a sort of ‘gateway’ technology.

An article from TMCNet titled ‘VoIP, UC, and UCC: Still Driven by Consumer Tools?‘ notes “An argument might also be made that much of the value of UC or UCC actually is captured by use of relatively simple tools such as Skype, or Google Voice or any number of other rather easy to understand consumer applications.”

The email client is generally the focal point for unified communications. Emails go there. Voicemails can be trasncribed into emails, or sent as attachments or links in an email. Instant messaging sessions and phone calls can be initiated. And now, with the addition of Google Buzz and Outlook Social Connectors, the email client is becoming the focal point for managing social networking as well.

Microsoft’s approach, using social connectors with Outlook, provides users with a means of aggregating all communications and activity for a given user in one space. The People Pane in Outlook 2010 shows a complete email history with the given user, calendar events, file attachments, RSS feeds, and social networking comments and status updates.

Microsoft Outlook with social connectors is a much more efficient and productive method of sifting through all of the messaging clutter to be able to quickly and easily find all relevant communications from a given user. There is still room, though, for someone to create a single software application to act as an interface to aggregate all of the various social networks in total, rather than on a contact by contact basis.

Get a Single Solution to Improve Call Processing at Your Local and Remote Sites

For dozens of years large enterprises deployed hardware attendant consoles to save effort for incoming call processing. With VoIP technologies all features of traditional consoles were transferred to software-based ones. Thus an operator can use such consoles of the both types to get incoming calls from several phone lines and route them to appropriate employees. However a software-based attendant console can help you also support:

Quick employee/phone number search

Quick text/voice messaging

Call recording

An intelligent call queuing

Moreover the foremost benefit, that a software-based console provides you with, is a remote team/at-home operator support.

Your benefits: you can deploy a single solution that integrates the advantages of many separate IP telephony applications to help your local and remote teams process incoming calls in the most effective way instead of purchasing several solutions for each site and thus save your money.

In some cases, you may need only some of the above features. Then you can get the demanded facility with a separate application, for example, a call recording application.

Get an Exact Picture of Your Customer Interactions

Call recording applications usually provide you with possibility to record all/selected conversations and manage these records.

Your benefits: A call recording application can help you:

Settle a dispute with a client

Get an exact picture of customer interactions

Monitor and improve customer service quality

Analyze a conversation with a colleague/partner

In particular, many companies prefer recording conference calls.

Save Time and Money for Communications with Effective Phone Meetings

You can use audio/video conferencing software to set up phone meetings with multiple local and remote participants in the most effective way:

Plan meetings and send invitations

Automatically connect conference call participants at the prescribed time

Re-dial users if a connection is broken

Share the documents

Record a conference session

Send chosen participants text messages

Organize a polling among conference call participants

Limit the number of full-duplex users (when tens/hundreds users participate in a conference call) and thus both avoid noise and prevent interruption

Connect to the current conference call new participants, who use IP/mobile/analogue phones or 3rd party web-conferencing solutions (such as Skype, WebEx, etc.)

(Note that conferencing solutions from different vendors provide various capabilities.)

Your benefits: With conference software you can:

Organize effectively the joint work of your remote team members

Conduct meetings with tens and even hundreds of participants

Save on equipping special meeting rooms

To save time on conference call gathering, you can send participants automatic invitations/notifications right from your IP phone, using an appropriate XML service.